Equality online doesn't mean equality offline.

Even though social media brings major benefits to previously excluded populations, such as ease of communication, this may not have any overall impact on exclusion, social differences, or oppression offline.

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Here, in contrast to Brazil, people avoid expressions of inequality both offline and online. This is partly because in our fieldsite, people strongly identify with a sense of being marginal compared to more metropolitan regions. In response they have a strong sense of their own community solidarity.

Social media allows people to present themselves as from a higher class through the posting of images showing what is considered to be a high-class lifestyle, but this does not translate to enhanced social standing offline.

Many Chinese social media platforms have game-like features that encourage users to collect points and display levels attained, often based on the amount of activity on a platform. This creates new forms of inequality online as poverty restricts the amount of time people can spend on the internet, therefore making it difficult to ascend the rankings.